Family Business

Nursing homes always give me the creeps.  “God’s Waiting Room” is definitely the most fitting description.  A building filled with elderly people, most of whom were all but forgotten by their families and society.  Some of the residents congregate in a main area where there is the ubiquitous television while others opt to stay in their room reflecting on their life.  Everyone had a common thread: they knew this was their last stop before taking that eternal dirt nap.  Alas, the lower a family’s income level is, the greater the degree of gloominess.  Thankfully, this nursing home was considered one of the “better” ones.  Regardless, it’s still not my ideal way of spending a Saturday afternoon.

“Your great-granddaughter is doing really good in grammar school, gramps.  Her teacher thinks she is ready to go into accelerated courses for math.  Who knows?  We may have another accountant in the family.  What do you think about that?”

I turned away from the dresser drawer I was reorganizing for the fifth time to see if my grandfather would even react to the news.  He was an accountant and founder of one of the oldest, private accounting firms in Philly.  Although senility was slowly robbing him him of his memory, his math skills were still spot on. 

“Surely hearing his great-granddaughter may follow in his footsteps might jog some kind of memory.”

To my heartache, his facial expression remained as blank as always. 

His hands remained folded in his lap atop his neatly pressed, tan trousers as he stared at nothing in particular.  His white, button down collar shirt and red bow tie gave him the look of a life sized ventriloquist’s dummy.  All he needed was a person standing behind the steel tubular chair he sat in and mimic making him talk.  The only challenge to that vision was the talking part.  For nearly two years, his voice was silent, as if it wished to accompany his ever ceasing memories.  If it weren’t for his occasional blinking, I was always in fear I was actually talking to a corpse in the room.

Pushing the drawer closed to his room’s uniformly issued dresser, I walked over to the window to stare at the scenery.  Gramps window sported a rather commanding view of the Delaware River.  I wasn’t much of one for the water.  No one in my family was really.  Sure we would go down to the Jersey shore on our summer holidays to the family beach house, but no one ever really had the desire to rent or buy a boat.  My gramps always said it was a foolish waste of time and money.  Why spend your life on the water when better things were done on land.  Being the domineering patriarch of our family, no one argued with his wisdom.  Even so, I always felt something drawing me to the water’s edge, like guilty pleasure.

“We weren’t always accountants, you know.”

The low toned yet rather loud nasally voice made me jump.  I turned to see my gramps staring at me, as if the invisible ventriloquist behind him finally decided to bring him to life.  His look was so serious, brows furrowed with his chest slightly puffed.

“Sea farin’ men, we were.  That’s how things were in our family.  My great granddad was a sailor, you know.”

I shook my head and smiled.  The feeling of shock from hearing his voice after a two year hiatus still hadn’t dissipated.  I parted ways with my window view and switched my focus to the man who taught me how to count to 100 by the time I was 3.

“No, gramps,” I said, still smiling at the fact we were conversing and not really caring about what, “I thought our family always abstained from the water.”

He turned his head to the window, now fixing his gaze to the river banks lined with trees.

“Indeed we were.  My great grandad was the last of them though.  The business we were in was all but gone when his ship was seized by the Navy.”

My head cocked to the left.  I reached into my memories for any family conversations that did not include accounting.  None came to mind.

“Why was it seized, gramps?”

I was now sitting on the edge of his freshly made, single bed.  Feelings of being a little girl in kindergarten, when the teacher would tell a story, possessed my nearly 40 year old body.  Aside from gramps telling us about his parents and their parents, I never heard much about our ancestors past that level.

“Because of what they were bringing back to the country.  We brought them here, you know.”

My eyes grew wide at his usage of “we” and “them”.

“Who, gramps?”

He looked at me and smiled.  It was a smile I had not seen in ages.  He had a hint of pride in his face, like he was about to tell me of some great historical accomplishment.

“The blacks, of course.  Got paid good money for those days.  He helped populate our country with them all.  Brought about 1,000 over here before the trade was stopped.  Thank your stars for them.  They made our family rich.”

A new wave of shock hit me now.  For being an accountant, I was a diehard liberal.  We didn’t even use the word “hate”.  My children knew it as an ugly word.  Fishing my thoughts through my own twilight zone, I was trying to fathom how my ancestors were in the business of slave trading and that it was what afforded us our livelihood.

Then there was silence.

My gramps face went back to being blank and unblinking; consequently, so was mine.